


our days of blossom

by ninemoons42



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/F, Hanami, Inspired by Miss Sherlock, Rule 63, Sakura (Cherry Blossoms), Stealth Crossover, consulting detectives, miss sherlock - Freeform, sherlock holmes fusion, stealth date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-04 17:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18348710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: She's still trying to get used to -- seasons at all, much less the advent of a season full of brightly blooming flowers.She's still trying to get used to -- being around people at all, much less people who actually want to see her, people who actually want her around (for company, for distraction, for her skills, for her own self).So why is she bobbing around in the wake of a sniper-sharp mind and a pair of silver stiletto heels?





	our days of blossom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Akumeoi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumeoi/gifts).



> I may or may not already be planning other bits and scenes for this because -- gah, cute modern girls are cute and awkward and sweet on each other, they just don't know how to be cute together yet.

It hurts, is the thing, she thinks. It hurts in her skin and it hurts in her mind and if she could only keep her wits about her, she’d be able to stop and think and identify. The nerves in her arms and along her shoulders, the guilty-party plexus -- and then maybe she’d be able to just isolate the whole thing, mentally. Block out the pain with conscious thoughts of her choice, creating a wall of reason and logic between her and the entirely illogical and irrational pain, the sharp teeth gnawing up and down her spine. 

If only she could cut out that pain -- but where will she ever find the right scalpel for the job? What anaesthetic will she use? Where will she lay herself down and also -- operate on herself? 

All she can do is hide her face in her oversized collars, and her hands in the lank sleeves of her hand-me-down coat. All she can do is curse the spring-storm in its rising roar, and the stupid and entirely primitive lack of heating in this blank unremarkable office. Unacceptable. How can people work in a place like this, where the draft chewing at her feet seems to grow stronger and stronger with every moment? How can they -- how can she -- survive the falling temperatures?

Oh, perhaps that’s the one thing she misses, about life in the particular war zone that she maybe still knows, still remembers, still unreasonably wants to return to: the warmth of the place, the constant reassurance of no winter at all, and certainly none of these temperature-swings, like an oscillation of nature’s shifting moods.

At least, at least she knows how to groan without making any actual sounds -- she just regrets the necessity of having to shuffle her feet, having to grind her teeth -- 

“I said, are you all right?”

Jolt of surprise like the powerful pulse of a defibrillator unit, a concentrated shock to her system, and she doesn’t jump or scream or do anything just as loud, but only just: the more so when she recognizes the towering frame of the man who’s stopped on his way to her. He’s about a desk away. The long hair in its neatly brushed tail, and the strands springing free -- perhaps from the oppressive humidity -- the still-too-young crags in his face. Ink, just visible above his well-pressed collar; stubble creeping in around the edges of his otherwise well-kept beard.

“I know it’s a stupid question,” that man says, continuing, “but Doc, it’s the neutral one to ask, you know that, right? You’ve asked it before.”

“I asked you,” and Noctis sighs, lets that sound out and feels guilty for it. “And you knew I wasn’t being neutral then.” She doesn’t even have the energy to -- at least tilt her head in the direction of the butterfly-strips of tape marching back from his forehead. The scab of the shallow knife-slash from only a few days ago, when this whole ill-advised adventure had gotten started. She remembers her own steady hands against the adrenaline-doubled pulse shallow and rapid beneath his skin.

“I should be grateful you asked at all.” That’s a harder thing to admit than she likes. “But can you do me a favor, and don’t make me repeat myself again? You can’t call me _Doc_. I’ve -- taken leave from my practice.” What a way to say it, she thinks. Bile coats the edges of her tongue, and she swallows with difficulty.

“I know you don’t like being called that,” is the easy response. “I also know you probably wouldn’t like to be called -- I don’t know. _Miz_ or some shit like that. And my mother raised me better, and I won’t call you by your first name, since you won’t call me mine -- I’m not gonna be that familiar. So, maybe come up with something you actually want to hear, or I’ll have to find some other way of calling you.”

“What do people call you when you’re off duty,” she mutters, purely to be contrary. 

“Sarge.”

Grin in his response, she hears it before she cuts her eyes in his direction and confirms it, and she’s sorely tempted to throw something at him, then, or at least that’s what she’s planning to do, after she comes up with a better response, something sharper -- 

“Feel warmer now?”

Blink, again.

He’s gesturing at his own face. “You looked cold. Now you’re red in the face. If I really did embarrass you, I’m sorry. But now you look like you might be a little warmer.”

And beyond him, closer to the whiteboards lining one entire wall of the room -- Noctis can see the little triumphant smile pulling up the corner of that woman’s mouth -- of Prompto’s mouth -- Prompto, who is looking at her smartphone with such quiet relish that she can’t possibly be seeing anything on it -- 

Eight days she’s known the woman, and she already knows how blank and unfocused Prompto’s face can get when her mind is churning with sharp insight. She already knows how Prompto’s smile -- so often so blade-like and insincere -- catches so many people off guard.

How can they not see the steel of her -- how can they not see the slashing insight in Prompto’s eyes, always there, always watching?

Eight days, and she’s no closer to deciphering the odd smudged softness in the corners of that present smile, the smile she’s seeing right now. What does it mean when Prompto, who dares the world to meet her strange blue-violet eyes, looks down and smiles?

“Will you excuse me a moment,” and Noctis leaves the man in her wake, leaves the view on the rain behind, and all but runs across the room towards Prompto.

Who says, “Hello,” and tilts the screen of her smartphone at her.

Oh. She was looking at something after all. 

Noctis sounds out the words: “ _...a reputation for eccentricity and a seemingly callous disregard for spending limits._ That doesn’t even make sense. Is that for -- ”

“Yes it is. Yes that’s her. I found her bank records. Eccentricity doesn’t even begin to cover it. I could almost admire her; she’s almost skilled at this kind of hiding.”

She considers her exact words for only a moment. “Do I want to know how? And do I have to remind you where we are and why we’re here?”

“Oh, you mean -- that Gladio and Cor can hear us? Why do you think they like to let me know what’s going on?” Oh, there are so many teeth now in Prompto’s smile. The sharp edges in her, feral-white, and Noctis ought to be running away -- ought to have run from the words and from the woman.

But no, she’s done precisely neither of those things, and in fact she’s leaning in to hiss some more. “I almost think you like being a cat’s paw.”

“That’s what they think of me. I don’t really care if they do, so long as I get what I want and what I need.” Shrug, so fluid, that Noctis can’t help but pay attention. Oversized hood on Prompto’s otherwise elegant black jacket, its tails falling all the way down to the knees of sleek skinny trousers. The subtle colors of her, showing at her wrists: three distinct shades of green sticking out of the jacket’s sleeves. 

Silver on Prompto’s feet to contrast the rest of her, stiletto-heels, and the entirely impractical thought of walking on drenched slippery sidewalks, and Noctis shivers and doesn’t want to think about the many ways a human foot can get broken, dislocated, or otherwise bent out of true.

She’s grateful for her own black skirts, her sensible layers. The boots on her feet that have carried her through dust and broken rocks and city rubble, all the way back to Insomnia and its impractically tiled sidewalks, its garden-path alleyways of cobblestones and pebbles.

Beside her, Prompto’s humming now, her hands in her pockets, maybe thinking, maybe making plans and worse, who could ever tell?

And then she catches sight of the very small smirk on the tall police inspector’s face and she remembers just what Prompto had said. “Do you really?” she asks, in his direction. 

He seems to understand exactly the question she hasn’t managed to ask. “She calls herself a consulting detective. That’s still true.”

“And the rest of it? What she just said?”

“I’m right here you know,” she hears Prompto say, complete with a sharp short bark of laughter.

“Her words, not ours. I am grateful for the help -- as constrained as we are, we wouldn’t really get as far as we need to without -- assistance -- from those who are relatively unfettered.” 

Not the words she’d ever expect to hear from someone as decorated as he is, even with the fact that she’d had to take the public-record facts on him with plenty of salt and reservations. 

“You’re as bad as her sister,” she mutters.

“Anyone with a brain would fear Lady Highwind,” is the still stonefaced reply she gets.

She throws her hands up, then, and heads for the door out of the office. 

If she has to take a cab back to Prompto’s manse, to the room that’s been hastily put together for her, then she’ll do it, and damn the unexpected hit to her wallet, because at least that comically large drift of quilts and pillows would make more sense, would be just the thing for her to hide in, away from the rain and the wind and the cold.

Away from people who don’t make sense and don’t stare at her, at the way she tries to hide every scrap of her own skin.

Only there’s a hand on her wrist, now, and steps keeping pace with hers, and the weight of that hand doesn’t seem like a shackle or a chain of some kind.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Prompto, quiet now, softly spoken words.

Noctis can’t find the usual acerbic edges of her, even as she strains to find them, even as she strains to follow them -- and that’s how she almost forgets about the weather, that’s how she runs out into the rain and then in from it, in the overhang of the side-street entrance to this building.

A car whirls up to them in a purr of sleek engines, and she watches Prompto throw her hood up and, impossibly, _run_ toward it. Tap of fingernails against the passenger-side door, and a muffled exchange of words -- none of which she hears, but the end result is the driver getting out and walking away beneath an umbrella, and Prompto running again, this time around the front end of the car to take the seat he’s vacated.

Surefooted and graceful for all that. How does she do it?

“Come on.”

Noctis blinks, and gets into the shotgun seat, and is grateful to close the door and make sure her window’s rolled up.

Now she just has to shake off the rain that’s fallen onto her, and she holds her fingers out to the vents and their waft of blessedly heated air, and -- just in time she clocks Prompto’s grip on the steering wheel -- Noctis clicks her seat belt on -- 

Prompto laughs, high sweet hard sound over the roar of the engine -- of course this cursed thing goes like a coupe despite the four doors, the very presence of the back seat -- the thrum warms her joints, too, with the wrong kind of rush entirely -- 

She has no idea where they’re going -- probably back into the center of Insomnia if the rising facades of rain-soaked steel and glass are any indication -- she doesn’t look at the monstrosity of the Citadel, rising in the very heart of the city -- she closes her eyes as soon as they take the first of the familiar roundabouts and keeps them closed even as they stop-and-start through intersections -- three, four --

Tap of warm fingers against her knuckles. “Almost done with this place.”

“Why are we even here,” she grits out.

“Airdrop,” and that doesn’t make sense, but for the brief sharp fanfare that blares out from Prompto’s smartphone. “Done. Hungry?”

What a question! “You’re not making sense,” she says, and turns in Prompto’s direction, though she still refuses to open her eyes.

“Not yet I am. When we stop you’ll understand.”

“Can’t we go -- back? Can’t we work from there?” And she thinks of books and papers in neat if tottering piles, tables and chairs and every inch of shelf-surface in Prompto’s cramped study covered in pages upon pages of scribbled-on paper. Boxes of unorganized photographs surrounding a cello-case, and the manuscripts of unfinished songs, the scattered dossier print-outs -- 

That kind of chaos at least is more familiar than most anything else in this place.

Insomnia’s chaos means nothing to her, means only running and hiding from the strangeness of it all -- 

“Bad day for a viewing,” she hears Prompto say, suddenly: the last word is so incongruous and strange and out of context and -- 

Oh.

Faint filtered sunlight through a break in the clouds. Watered-down glow, falling into the puddles. 

And Prompto brings the car to a stop right on the last intersection before the tree that even Noctis remembers, vaguely, like a dream of trunk and wide-spreading branches and the nearly-lost scent of cherry blossoms.

A different kind of rain, here, a soft drifting descent, and Noctis gets out of the car without any prodding at all. 

Petals cascading in the still-damp air, and everywhere they land they cling -- as she finds, when she walks straight into a still-whole flower and it won’t fall away from her cheek, and she has to peel it off, as carefully as she can. Like making tiny precise incisions, like closing those same incisions with tiny close stitches.

Prompto catches up to her with a grin: the petals catch in her hair, against her freckles, on the wrapping-cloth she’s carrying, folded into and around a boxy shape. “Do you mind?”

“What?”

“Bench,” she hears Prompto say. “I don’t want to sit. But if you do, that bench might still be a little wet.”

“I,” she begins, and looks instead. Simple curves of steel, elegant scroll-lines. Rain still left in the crevices.

So Noctis shrugs, one-shouldered, and takes the wrapped box from Prompto, and puts it on the bench. “It can sit there. I’ll stand.”

“Fine.” And Prompto is -- not quite sharing her personal space, when she finally comes to a stop, and Noctis doesn’t want to fight the impulse to step a little closer.

The cherry tree towers far, far over their heads, a canopy of pink flower-fall and smoke-sweet scent.

“This is the only thing I ever loved in this place,” she hears Prompto say. “The only -- silly little activity I wanted to do, growing up.”

“I think this was the only thing I wanted to see,” Noctis mutters in response. “I was too used to -- the flowers in the desert. The flowers in the war zone. Succulents. They don’t bloom very often. This one, at least, you could hope that it would flower every year.”

“Crowds soon.” A warning, and a reminder.

Noctis appreciates both of those things. “Yes. But while they’re all still in school, or at work -- ” 

“Like those two idiots we left behind. It must be painful to be them.”

“So, again, why do you work with them,” Noctis asks, but it’s not a keen curiosity that makes her ask.

“The puzzles,” she says. “They’re not cases, not to me. Small puzzles to solve.”

“It’s life and death to others.”

“So I’ve been made aware. But people stake their lives and deaths on strange things.”

“What do you stake your life on?”

She sees Prompto shrug, from very close by. “The truth.”

“How subjective,” Noctis mutters.

Sharp laughter again, next to her.

She wonders if she’s looking for some kind of approval in the tail-ends of that laugh.

Instead, what she gets is Prompto moving away, only for a moment, only to bring her a box with a clear lid. Compartments, and things neatly organized into those compartments.

In the corner near her hand is a tiny ceramic cup and a bare half-inch of golden-brown liquid -- that flows, but much too slowly, when she lifts it out and tilts it just a little, from side to side.

So, not tea, then. “What is it?”

“Goes with the sweets. Like syrup.”

Which may or may not explain the picks in another compartment, and the pastel-hued shapes of flowers and leaves and very small fruit.

Green and pink and white dumplings, skewered onto delicate twigs tagged in pale pink.

“Viewing sweets,” she says, softly. “I’ve only ever heard of them. I’ve never had them before.”

A smile is all the response she gets, those pretty eyes closed and nested in the lines of Prompto’s face.

Not for the first time, Noctis has questions about the faint scar-lines across the bridge of Prompto’s nose.

But she lets the questions go, this time, as another whole blossom falls into her box of sweets, and she eats, and stares up at the tree as it continues to rain down its petals.

And she sighs, warmed, when Prompto’s shoulder makes contact with hers.

A flower lands in Prompto’s hair, and another, and another, seeming to drift right into her hood, and Noctis smiles.

The more so when Prompto takes out one of those flowers and -- drops it into Noctis’s collars.

She can’t mind that at all.

If only she could hold Prompto’s hand, too, she thinks, and she sets her empty box aside, back onto the bench.

To decide to reach out is easy.

Actually doing it, not so much: but her hand stops in mid-movement, caught already in Prompto’s own.

As simple as the rest of the world, the rest of her body, the rest of her mind, isn’t.

It’s not a drift: one moment they’re standing a little apart and the next they’re pressed together, shoulders and elbows and wrists and hips, and they’ve never even looked, never even hesitated.

She doesn’t want to talk and break the spell -- but when she does cut her eyes Prompto’s way, she catches a glimpse of Prompto looking back.

Gone the echoes of her own pain, in her body, in her mind: all she knows for this moment is Prompto. The warmth of her -- who could have ever guessed? Warmer and sharper and stranger and still oddly gentle, too, on top of all that.

It’s enough, for now: it’s enough, beneath this tree, beneath these flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/) \-- or, hey, if Tumblr becomes too rotten and we can't talk there any more, there's always Twitter, where I am @ninemoons42.


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